I call AIRHART an airport operations orchestration platform

Martin Bowman, Chief Strategy Officer at Smarter Airports, spoke to Airport Technology to give an update on its proprietary AIRHART system a year after we visited its first application in Copenhagen, Denmark. Netcompany developed the multifactor tool to manage airport operations with its local partner, Copenhagen Airport in 2023.

The appointment of a new strategy leader seems an opportune moment to catch up with the tech firm giving airports a chance to see another way of operating, as Bowman describes it.

Patrick Rhys Atack: Martin you’ve been brought in as Chief Strategy Officer for Smarter Airports and its AIRHART airport management product – tell us how you explain and sell the tech tool?

Martin Bowman: I like to think of it as a next generation in airport orchestration and airport operations. It has its origins in the traditional tools used to operate an airport. But what it doesn’t have is any of the restrictions and the limitations and any of the boundaries of those traditional systems.

So, whilst from a from a business capability point of view, it does the stuff that traditional systems would do, it doesn’t do [it] with any of the same barriers or ‘start, middle, ends’, it’s much more extendable. It’s much more holistic, a much more strategic approach to delivering operational technology at an airport. And that’s part of the challenge. The challenge that we have is essentially with a new category. We’re a new way of working, a new way of doing things. And I think that’s what has happened in the last 12 months… we have moved. Obviously, our origins are in what we’ve been doing with Copenhagen.

But we’ve broadened beyond Copenhagen. We obviously continue to work extensively with Copenhagen, but we’ve broadened, and we have got the first mixed major airport has embraced this kind of new way of working and has embraced it as a platform.

PRA: Tell us about that growth in Munich, are they using the tech in the same way as Copenhagen?

MB: They haven’t gone down the route of labelling the platform and putting it into a specific capability or a specific category. They’ve said, ‘No, this is operational transformation. This is digital transformation of the operation. We’re not going to put the boundaries on this. We’re going to have things that we’re hoping to do. We’re going to have plans that we’re hoping to execute against.’

But this is basically something that is limited [only] by our imagination. You know, we can extend this and take this much, much further. So that’s massively encouraging. And I think it’s given us confidence to be brave and basically say that this isn’t your traditional system. This isn’t your traditional way of doing this. This is a new generation, but this is a new way of doing it. This is a new capability, a new category in technology. And I think that’s what you’ll see going forward with us.

PRA: I hear there are more contracts in the works – can you confirm that?

MB: Hopefully we’ll, you know… I don’t want to kind of hex us or anything. But there’s a couple of others that are moving towards that conclusion. And again, the type of organizations that they are, it gives us confidence that this is starting to become something that’s recognized by major airports, that actually the status quo and the continuation of that way of doing things just doesn’t give them what they’re looking for. And they’re wanting something more. They’re wanting more flexibility that a platform-based approach gives them.

PRA: Is it simply European partners you’re currently looking for, or is your forward-looking strategy also international, multi-continent?

MB: If you look at where we are seeing momentum, I wouldn’t say it’s coincidental, the momentum within the European market and Netcompany being a major European technology company…  the synergies are there. But what would also see is that there is also a recognition that the European airports in particular are feeling the capacity crunch, probably more than most others.

You know, the latest forecast figures from the Eurocontrol up to 2050 [show] the number of capacity-constrained airports is expected to increase quite significantly. So airports are actually looking to not just build infrastructure out of some of their operational challenges, [they are] looking at kind of Smarter infrastructure asset optimization, intelligent decision making. It doesn’t surprise me that the European market is picking up on this first. It does also help being a European organization, that is, there’s probably a recency and a kind of relevance to what we’re what we’re doing, that helps with that.

We’ve seen this in aviation, and over the last kind of 15, 20 years, there’s been a lot of initiatives that were born out of Europe… people have realized it’s a good concept and therefore, it doesn’t have boundaries. ACDM is a great example of that. ACDM was all born out of the European SESAR research. But how many ACDM airports are there in the world now? They’re not European, it’s all across the world.

So I would hope over time we will be expanding.

PRA: So is that your aim for the next year, to grow further afield?

MB: The main strategic thrust over the next 12 months will be embedding the concept of an ‘operations orchestration platform’ into the general vernacular of the industry. That will be what we are focusing on, getting the industry to recognize there is an alternative to the traditional systems in the traditional way.

One of the things I talk about, I call AIRHART, we’re working on this as a brand, an ‘airport operations orchestration platform’, so it’s an AOOP, right? So the way I talk about that, it’s like the AODB as we know it is dead, right? It’s like, that’s the old way of doing it. That is the old kind of historical way we do it. This way it is now the AOOP. So the strategy is to educate the market that there is a new alternative to that traditional systems approach that they had.

PRA: So that’s the forward direction – but tell us about the company you’ve joined, how does the last 12 months look from where you are now?

MB: I think the thing that that we first and foremost, really strongly believe in, and we think it’s strongly reflected in the platform, is the airports are an ecosystem. Both in terms of the people, the kind of functional people that operate at the airport, but also in terms of the technologies which support the operation of the airport.

And so one of the things that we’ve been doing the last 12 months at Copenhagen has been working with one of the vendors that is applying AI to a particular problem in a particular area, there’s two use cases as one. There’s one around operational efficiency and turnaround efficiency, and then there’s another one around kind of sustainability and emission reductions and so on. And so that partner system, that expert system, is off doing its bit, and it’s off gathering its insights. But what is then happening is Airhart is then, you know what, as the data and as the insights are becoming available, Airhart is then triggering the wider management system, shall we say, triggering the wider organization and using its orchestration ability to then trigger changes and process and make sure that the insights are being actioned.

I think it’s been a major step forward in the last 12 months, because, again, I’m firmly of the belief that there isn’t a ‘silver bullet’ solution. This isn’t singular technology that delivers the positive change. It requires the ecosystem to work in collaboration. It requires the vendors to work in collaboration. And we very much embrace that. And I would expect to see us again, continuing that going forward, so that that’s definitely something that has been looked on in the last 12 months, and there’s been strong progress.

PRA: And what about you, what attracted you to Netcompany and joining the Smarter Airports division?

MB: I was already aware of Smarter Airports, because I’m an industry guy, so I obviously track the industry and know what’s going on. But I properly encountered it, and it was like direct, first-hand encountering, just on some work I was doing for a couple of major airports. I was doing some stuff for them, and the more I learned about it, the more I went, ‘Oh, I quite like the sound of this’. And, actually, I was a bit of a cynic at first.

I actually had a colleague who had joined Deloitte from Netcompany, who had worked on it.  And he was talking to me about it. I was in cynic mode, and I’m going, ‘well, it’s an AODB, right? It’s an AODB. How could, like, you know, how can it be that revolutionary? It manages flight data, manages the aircraft data. It does Master Data Management. It does notifications, so just an AODB, right?

And [he] kept saying to me: ‘I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s different’. And so when I was doing this work for this other airport, I got quite close to it, and I was getting quite granular around some of the stuff I was asking, because I’ve got background in the industry. I kind of know a bit about the industry. So I was getting quite specific around things.

And every answer that I got, I was like, ‘I like that. it was clear that it was flexible, and it was clear that there was way more power under the hood than I’d ever assumed. And then long story short, I was at a wee bit of a crossroads myself. I had some options to go down different routes, including with Deloitte, and I decided that I probably wanted to get back closer to the industry.

Because when you do strategy work, it’s very, very satisfying. You’re at the heart of the idea process. And really doing all the thinking. But the problem when you do strategy work is you don’t stick around to see the change, you don’t stick around to see what happens.

And, off the back of that, I wanted to do the ‘do’, it was not just enough to do the ‘think’. So at that point, there was obviously a couple of conversations and Smarter Airports being one of them.

So to be honest with you, what flipped the switch for me, what got it was that that motivation to change the industry approach, and the ability to basically get the industry to recognize that there is an alternative to the way you’ve done things historically.

PRA: You seem genuinely passionate about it, which is fantastic, but as we all know that’s not enough for C-Suite success. What will you class as success going forward in this role?

MB: So I think on the macro level, success is the industry recognizing and adopting the new approach to operational technology and operational orchestration, and whether it be us or others that might subsequently follow,  anything that unlocks the legacy is just such a positive step forward.  

At the micro level, I really do think we are primed for really digitally enabling larger, more complex airports. There’s a couple of organizations in particular I think we are just ideally suited for. So if we could progress against those, that would be great.

Total Airport Management (TAM) has bounced around for years, and it’s never really gathered momentum and it’s not that the concept itself is flawed.

What it is, this technology to actually enable it hasn’t been available for such a long time, because you can’t enable TAM  if all your estate is covered in legacy [technology]. I would love to see if we could see TAM having a new breath of life, right? And TAM coming alive again. And people actually go, ‘We can actually do this now. This isn’t some sort of academic concept over there. We can actually do this now.’ And if AIRHART and Smarter Airports can be at the heart of TAM coming back into fashion and genuinely delivering value, I would be delighted with that. I would be so proud of that.